<p>As more students question rising college costs, professors defend useless research and their lack of teaching.</p>
<p>By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY</p>
<p>'Crisis of Confidence Threatens College." So went a headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education this spring, describing a recent survey of the American public. "Public anxiety over college costs is at an all-time high," the report concluded. "And low-income college graduates or those burdened by student-loan debt are questioning the value of their degrees."</p>
<p>In the face of such anxiety, one might expect college faculty to re-examine the financial priorities of universities, or at least put up a reasonable front of listening and responding to their critics. Instead, academics have circled the wagons, viciously attacking any outsider who dares to disagree with them, and insisting that reformers are not sophisticated enough to understand the system.</p>
<p>In a book published last month, "The Faculty Lounges . . . And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For," I argue that our system of higher education is focused too much on research and not enough on teaching. In fact, one 2005 study in the Journal of Higher Education suggests an inverse relationship between the amount of time spent in the classroom and a professor's salary. It would seem that professors who spend their time writing are the ones most valued by our universities.</p>
<p>Yeah, because I’m sure none of the ~175,000 people living in the [Navajo</a> Nation](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation]Navajo”>Navajo Nation - Wikipedia) have any need for scholarly research on the economic and cultural impacts of their traditional activities-turned-commercial pursuits. Nor does anyone at all care about the history of Native American interactions with modern American culture. It isn’t sexy and it doesn’t make someone a billion dollars, so it’s completely irrelevant, right?</p>
<p>The driving force of the op-ed is not whether any particular research is relevant or not, but rather why the students should have to be the ones to pay for it, particularly in a day and age when students are increasingly being burdened with greater educational cost. Studying the cultural interactions of the Navajo Nation may well be a worthy research endeavor, but why should the students of the universities engaging in that research have to be the ones paying for it?</p>
<p>$1Billion. That is the reason schools like profs that bring in the research projects because most come with funding that keeps the place going. Wisconsin for one takes around $300 Million off the top to support other programs from the Billion it gets a year. That’s like adding $6 Billion or so to the endowment. They also use the rent charged for research space to fund great new science buildings–a couple $Billion worth over the last 10 years. Research at the top levels can be a money machine for the university. But very little goes to things like studying NAs.</p>
<p>And the students pay for none of it and get better research opps. Profs still teach the same amount they did 30 years ago.</p>
<p>I fully support research but I don’t think they teach as much as they used to. It is not uncommon for newly hired faculty in engineering and business to have a contract that stipulates a 3 course teaching load…per year… at a Research 1 school. This is the new norm where I teach. The ‘old timers’ still teach 4 unless they have an endowed research chair, which many do, and in that case they teach 3.</p>
<p>That might have more to do with the market for those profs–high demand and short supply=sweet deals. Most schools cannot afford that level of luxury.</p>
<p>UW Madison 1988 2.15 classes per prof
2010:2.06 classes per prof.</p>
<p>Using mixed data and averages can be dubious as they are not often comparable over time. Here is 1 real place that is pretty typical for a top research school with limited funds. In other words not Harvard, Stanford, MIT.</p>